What Happens When You Ask Everyone Except Yourself?

On Reassurance, Rituals, and the Cost of Outsourcing Certainty

It’s always 2:00 AM when my thoughts begin to repeat themselves. In the late hours of a Tuesday that dragged on too long, my psyche turns into a restless toddler, starved for attention. No matter how exhausted I am, my thoughts are tireless.

The voice in my head swings between the trivial, why hasn’t he texted me back, and the vaguely theological: do I need God (and, if so, which one). There is no hierarchy. Everything feels equally urgent.

For a while, I mistook this for an inability to tolerate uncertainty. I told myself I was bad at not knowing. After a few hours spent rephrasing the same question to ChatGPT, just to see if the answer would change, a different pattern emerged.

I wasn’t avoiding uncertainty. I was outsourcing certainty.

Obsessing over AI interpretations and astrological readings gave me a false sense of productivity. It led me to a narrow, incense-heavy room, sitting across from a psychic beneath a buzzing neon We’re Open sign. As she assured me everything was “unfolding exactly as it should,” I nodded, relieved. An answer, even a vague one, felt better than none.

It was the comforting illusion of doing something to fix my unknowing: the belief that if I explained my confusion well enough, it would resolve itself out of courtesy. Rationalization as a remedy.

But each time I placed my phone down after a three-hour FaceTime, the realization was the same. Unpacking a situation again (and again) hadn’t brought clarity. It only made me more confused.

So why does it feel so good to spin in circles?

These tools work, but not in the way they are intended. They don’t provide answers or clarity; they provide relief.

There is a difference between reflection and deferral, and I had become fluent in the latter. I wasn’t looking for someone, or something, to tell me what to do. I was looking for someone else to hold the responsibility of not knowing. Or, at the very least, to offer a narrative that made the discomfort feel purposeful. Something (anything!) to suggest that uncertainty was temporary, and that a state of knowing was just around the corner.

As much as I wish this were a unique experience, I don’t think it is. There is something deeply seductive about narrative. Humans crave stories. Uncertainty has no plot, no arc, no guarantee of resolution. This is why it can feel so profoundly uncomfortable. And why narrative, any narrative, is soothing by comparison. Etsy witches and tarot cards offer narrative scaffolding: a way to believe that while life cannot be controlled, at least it can be interpreted. Even if that interpretation comes at the cost of reality.

At first, it didn’t seem like a problem. If a little reassurance took the edge off, what was the harm? But habits don’t announce themselves as destructive. They reveal their cost gradually, in small humiliations: repeating the same story with increasing urgency; waiting for reassurance before acting; realizing mid-conversation, as I watched the other person’s attention drift, how much effort I was putting into not letting something go.

As time passed, and the side effects of this habit began to register, the cost of externalizing intuition became harder to ignore. The longer I outsourced certainty, the quieter my own instincts became. The more answers I collected, the less capable I felt of choosing. Each time I looked outward, I was quietly teaching myself that I could not be trusted.

The questions still arrive at 2:00 AM. The difference now is that I don’t answer them right away. I let them repeat themselves. I let them stay unanswered.

Sitting with uncertainty hasn’t made me calmer or wiser, but it has made me slower. Slower to narrate, slower to outsource, slower to mistake relief for understanding.

A chance to notice the impulse to reach outward before acting on it. Sometimes I still reach. Sometimes I don’t. But the space itself feels like progress, even if nothing inside it resolves.

Not knowing, I’m beginning to realize, isn’t a failure of intuition. It’s the cost of keeping it intact.